Family Room Built-Ins {Part 2}

The husband was wonderful and really did a lot of the building all by his lonesome so I could wrangle & entertain the little man. Props to him!

We started out making basic wooden boxes that were 68″ x 60″. Not wanting to get all fancy or anything, we butted the edges against each other, glued, and nailed instead of doing the whole 45 degree angle thing. Nothing wrong with that method at all…but we figured we wouldn’t push our luck too much with this being the first big building project we’ve ever tackled and all.

We have been using Titebond Wood Glue…it’s amazing stuff. Now, we haven’t used any other, so I can’t say without a doubt that it’s the best out there, but it’s been wonderful for us!

The husband found these crazy cool right angle clamps at the hardware store and bought a few for this project. However, because there are so many boxes within boxes in our design, only having 4 of these clamps was really slowing the building process down.

My ingenious husband decided to build our own right angle clamps out of scrap wood and basic quick grip clamps that we had lying around from previous projects.

He glued together two pieces of wood {using a plastic square as a guide} then took two of the basic clamps, one for each piece of wood, and attached his homemade right angle clamp to the built-in! Though I wholeheartedly believe that metal right angle clamps are the way to go for the large outside pieces, the smaller inside angles turned out just fine with our homemade version {and it saved us a bundle}!

Here’s a picture of the right-side built-in halfway through the building process. {It’s upside down}. Lookin’ good!

*Note the 2×4 holding up the center piece of plywood…

For these next photos please ignore the looks-like-it’s-been-through-a-tornado garage! We hadn’t even finished unpacking and organizing the garage when starting this project so everything just got piled to one side. {Not to mention there are 2 other projects waiting to be finished in the background}.

But anyway…here it is right-side-up.

One of the plywood pieces was horribly warped. We tried everything possible to get it into place but it just wouldn’t budge. So we took a wood shim and used our Dremel Multi-Max to cut it even with the other wood. Eventually we will be adding trim to the whole thing and you won’t even know it’s there!

A few more pieces of wood glued and nailed and there you have it…the “finished” right-side of our built-in cabinet! There’s SO much more to do, but I’m really excited and I think it’s looking great!

Just to re-cap…
This piece will be on the right side of our Wall-O-Entertainment; a bench with storage will be in the center underneath our TV, and a piece similar to the one on the left will flank the TV on the left hand side.
Eventually, the whole thing will be sanded, primed, painted, trimmed out, and installed! I’m tired just thinking about it all, but I can’t get over how amazing it will be.